[Juvenalia]: [Perrault, Charles]:

$1,750 · Offered by William Reese Company

A NEW HISTORY OF BLUE BEARD, WRITTEN BY GAFFER BLACKBEARD, FOR THE AMUSEMENT OF LITTLE LACK BEARD AND HIS PRETTY SISTERS. A charming, early American chapbook of the famous French folktale. The Metropolitan Museum attributes the illustrations to pioneering wood engraver Alexander Anderson (1775-1870). Jane Pomeroy also traces how Anderson's engravings were repurposed across contemporary publications: the frontispiece showing a seated man wearing a Chinese-style hat first appeared in The Trifle Hunter (Hartford: John Babcock, 1798), while the illustration of Bluebeard's castle (seen here as a distinctly recognizable Tower of Babel) originated in Babcock's History of the Bible (1798), before appearing in his 1800 edition of the present title. "The story of Bluebeard, which belongs to the common stock of folk-lore, came to England in this form, and thence to America, from the famous French fairy story of Charles Perrault (1628–1703), first printed in 1697 in his Histoire et contes du tems passé. French tradition attaches the Bluebeard legend to Gilles de Rais, a Breton chief of the 6th century, who dabbled in magic, slew children, and committed other atrocious crimes. The editor of this present version of the story has seized any opportunity to point a moral. As soon as Fatima knew she would be forced to go with Bluebeard, she wrote immediately to Selim. Now only think what a fine thing it is to be a scholar, for if Fatima could not have write to her lover, nobody else would have

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